Over the past five years, Delfina Giannattasio has travelled between her main residence in London, her family home in Rome and then a found retreat within the maritime landscape of Argentario. These are the locations embedded in her latest series of paintings. The sky and weather, the sea with its reflections of light as well as the architectural landscape of the cities she encounters, shape and define her work and inform her practice of painting. Memory and the passage of time is a significant area of focus in these works. Here, Giannattasio explores how light, colour, the organisation of space and materiality act as triggers to call up the familiar, the known, the lived in both time and place. For example, Room with a View #2 (2019) re-produces a sense of the nostalgia one might feel during a rainy day in London for other climes and places. In Room with a View #3 (2019), she draws on the movements of earth and water at dawn in the region of Argentario as tides move to reveal or conceal the land and announce a new day alongside the sun.

Giannattasio’s approach to abstraction maintains a tension between the real and the imagined, the lived and the known, and a working process that allows for accident and incident to define when a work is not so much finished as complete. This is particularly evident in the way she exploits the materials used: a diluted use of acrylics, with the impact this has on colour and saturation, to the sudden interruption of a radically other and earthen materiality that quotes as much from the built environment as the earth itself. This is especially true in Elemental: Earth, Sky, Sea, Air (2019), where the bird’s eye view produced in the three-panel work positions a viewer as beholder of a transition from land to sea that encompasses all. If Elemental investigates landscape in its most essential forms and parts and then in the series Room with a View Giannattasio breaches the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, the 16-panel grid titled 4x4 Skies (2019) draws on her wider work to at once launch a modernist exploration of the grid, something that underpins the development of three-point perspective in the Renaissance, while fundamentally grounding this piece in a conceptual realm. Paintings are generally made on a wall, easel or the floor. These positions tend to reproduce the view of the maker for a viewer. In these depictions of sky structured as a grid, this logic is interrupted in a work where verticality and horizontality merge and co-exists in one view repeated across sixteen moments.

Delfina Giannattasio (b.1988) lives and works in London, Rome and Porto Ercole. Trained as an architect at the all’École Nationale d’Architecture de Paris la Villette, she has painted all her life and exhibited in Milan and London. ‘En Plein Air’ constitutes her first solo-exhibition in Rome.